Placing a Stop-Loss ( to Lock In profits ) on a Regular Long .......

December 15th, 2016, 08:51 PM

Call or Put trade/position

EXAMPLE:

If I'm Long a Call , and am in the Plus by $10,000 ..... can i put a Stop-Loss on the trade to Automatically get me out of the trade, if my $10,000 profit on the trade, turns to ( drops ) to say $8,000 profit ( so I've lost $2,000 on the trade ) ?

Can you place a stop-loss directly on the Options trade itself , or do you have to Monitor the trade Daily , and get out of the trade manually at a $2,000 loss ?

Thanks for the help, much appreciated

December 16th, 2016, 05:00 PM

md1933

Call or Put trade/position

EXAMPLE:

If I'm Long a Call , and am in the Plus by $10,000 ..... can i put a Stop-Loss on the trade to Automatically get me out of the trade, if my $10,000 profit on the trade, turns to ( drops ) to say $8,000 profit ( so I've lost $2,000 on the trade ) ?

Can you place a stop-loss directly on the Options trade itself , or do you have to Monitor the trade Daily , and get out of the trade manually at a $2,000 loss ?

Thanks for the help, much appreciated

Yes, but be careful with the bid/ask spread which can be high and trigger the order too quickly.
If you're happy with the profit take it. Keep in mind that Theta will go to zero sooner or later

.

December 17th, 2016, 11:11 AM

Once an option goes deep in the money (ITM) it tends to trade very infrequently and as stated the bid/ask can become quite wide. A better approach would be to use an alert on the underlying price and then close the trade manually. You need to pick that price point carefully because you are essentially using a trend following system and you don't want to get shaken out by a pull back. There is no way to avoid giving some profit back if you want to stay in the market for possible further gains while getting out when the trend has clearly changed.

Placing a Stop-Loss ( to Lock In profits ) on a Regular Long .......

Discussion in Options

Placing a Stop-Loss ( to Lock In profits ) on a Regular Long .......